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Sloth

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About Sloth

  • Birthday 07/15/1967

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    Melbourne, Australia

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  1. Hi, For any admin who reads this: You need to fix the descriptors that come up when someone searches on 'battlefront' or 'combat mission' on google. In both cases the battlefront site comes up in the #1 position in search results, but it looks like a web security company site and not a site that has anything to do with combat mission or other games. Two examples of searches on google.com.au and the results are shown below. Search on 'battlefront' gives the following result Battlefront.com - 10:49pmOpen Source PHP Anti Hacker - An open source web security system that enhances the security of your web platform. www.battlefront.com/ - Cached - Similar Search on 'combat mission' gives the following result Open Source PHP-Anti-Hacker - 10:49pmOpen Source PHP Anti Hacker - An open source web security system that enhances the security of your web platform. www.battlefront.com/ - Cached - Similar
  2. Steam annoys me quite a bit, but one questionably useful thing it does do is record how many hours you spend playing a game. You can also see how many hours your 'friends' spend playing. Thus whenever I want to bait a friend of mine, I threaten to reveal to his wife that he is up to 1260 hours playing team fortress 2. How is this relevant? Well for any game I particularly like I'll easily rack up over 100 hours. When I look at the entertainment cost per hour for the game it might be 20 or 30 cents. Compared to buying books, seeing movies, going to restaurants, working out at the gym it's cheap cheap cheap. If you look at the world this way then whether you are paying $10, $15 or $20 bucks for shipping is kind of immaterial. When I started buying video games in the mid-80's they cost $60 plus postage. This one costs about the same 25 years on, so in real terms it's waaay cheaper. You can agree with my perspective and be happy, or complain about the price and be grumpy. I prefer happy.
  3. Like anything steam can be a mixed blessing. From Australia it will often download at only 15kbs for hours at a time. If the client is not co-operating, which happens sometimes, then you can't access your single-player games - very frustrating. Even more frustrating if you have to re-install the client because you then have to also re-install all your games - re-downloading 5-6 games at slow download rates is a real pain. So sounds good as a friend finder, but it's performance in this part of the world sounds pretty different to what it is in the US.
  4. Hi, I Just pre-ordered a copy. When I got to the end of the process where it showed all my details and asked for final confirmation, my country (Australia) wasn't shown in my address. So I had to cycle all the way back through the order process to check that my country was in fact in my address (it was). This is a minor thing, but as we know, anything that makes the order process hard will turn off some customers. Could you possibly fix it so country is shown on the final confirmation page? Before anyone tells me to go post this in the helpdesk page a) my experience with helpdesk has been mixed emailing is harder c) I know the owners read these forums thanks
  5. The fact that this threads title is true, is pretty unfortunate. The old tradeoff exists between telling people it will be released 'soon' (as at December 10th) and being wrong or telling people it will be released 'when it's ready', which sounds arrogant and contemptous to customers. Personally I think customers are more forgiving of the former, especially when people give updates explaining why delays have occurred. It brings customers along with you and makes them feel more part of the process. Now, rant completed, you can rely on me to send some fulsome praise, when this is released someday.
  6. Mmmm . . . let me see, if I spend my frequent flyers going to Sydney for a game preview instead of a wedding anniversary present, then the seperation should occur about the time the game is released, giving me more free time to play. Which, if it's a great game could be worth it. Decisions, decisions.
  7. ROFL (I understand that a monumental sig line can help to differentiate the quality of the poster, but Lanzfeld's reason is a lot more entertaining).
  8. One vote for the real time pause feature post-release please. My friends don't have the patience for email or my expertise at non-stop real time, so this feature will be a good way to attract them to the game and sell a few extra copies.
  9. Great post Erwin, especially the bit about verisimilitude, which supports my own prejudices I spent about a decade in the Australian Army including some time in Army Office, so your comments about procurement ring true. If approached by them its absolutely worth confirming that the person calling is from an area that has a clear mandate to do this work, as well as the budget. On the plus side the Aussie dollar is strong against the greenback right now, so their capacity to spend will be up a bit.
  10. Pardon my ignorance, but do higher quality units do a better job of accurately spotting enemy? If so then some of this other stuff doesn't matter so much.
  11. This seems to be the nub of the discussion. Better trained & experienced troops operate better on the battlefield & troop quality is vitally important. The game already simulates this to some extent with less experienced troops less likely to fire and more likely to rout. However less well trained troops DO take longer to assess what's happening and react. A better trained group WILL be better at seizing fleeting opportunities and moving quickly, not because they are faster runners etc. but simply because they are better at understanding what's going on around them and operating appropriately as a team. I do struggle to understand those folks who argue that this isn't a factor in battle but can absolutely see that the time/effort required to implement a system could be too great. Having something along the lines of having no delay on orders for the highest quality troops and a small amount (say 8 secs) for the worst quality, would be a significant gain - especially for real time gaming where delays of this length could have a significant impact. This might not be historically accurate but would be more accurate in modelling the impact of troop quality than not having something like this. (note I am talking about small unit quality not higher HQ command delay here). Given this discussion is really about game improvement tradeoffs, I suspect it would help if, in the fullness of time, Steve could give some advice around the tradeoffs (i.e. "guys, you can have a command/experience delay system, or you can have A,B & C - which do you think is more important?"). Having now stated something that has probably been covered in many other threads, I'll shut up.
  12. Hi all, A few thoughts 1. The starting point for considering command delays is to consider what you are trying to simulate (or even if you are aiming for a sim or a game). The problem with command delays here arises because: a) command delays are absolutely crucially important if you are a HQ. For CM this probably applies to company HQ and definitely battalion HQ. If you are trying to simulate a battalion commander's experience of an attack then delays in changing initial orders are crucial. As an officer I found delays were also important in planning as co-ordinating an attack so that things arrived together was key. For more senior HQ it becomes essential. The ability to go through the sequence of observing, orienting, deciding and acting quickly was a key to German success at the operational level in early parts of WWII. Degrading the enemies ability to do this is the goal of command and control warfare these days. They are also a nice way to model the benefits of better troop training (e.g. in CMX1 they were a key difference between conscript, regular, elite troops etc. c) but the command delay makes much less sense at the section/squad & platoon levels. At these levels responses are drive much more by IA's (Immediate Actions), SOP or whatever you wish to call them. This particularly applies to first-contact and run away type drills. So, is combat mission more a game about battalion command or tactical firefights, pretty toys etc? Ideally you could have two seperate games (or even one multiplayer game with different levels of command), but in the absence of this you have to settle for one. I think it is the latter. If it were a battalion command game you would absolutely have delays as well as fuller planning orders set for your subordinate units, boundarys between units, primary & secondary objectives etc. etc. I would love to play this game. However I also love the tactical firefight stuff where you can manage the individual vehicles. Humans get a lot of satisfaction out of controlling things and a game that reduces that control is usually less enjoyable. Being able to manouevre realistic vehicles and troops over realistic terrain is, on balance, probably more fun than acting as battalion commander in BHQ. This means that any delay system would need to be optional as it wouldn't provide the game some folks are looking for. With all that said, on balance I quite liked the delay system in CMX1. Yes it meant some road moves were slow, but it really brought out the flavour of better trained/experienced troops being more effective on the battlefield, while forcing you to use conscipts for simpler, less active work. Wego doesn't really replicate this. I would have thought the realism advantage of Wego over realtime is that wego allows more realistic consideration of what 20-30 units would have time to think about rather than having one human reacting to everything in realtime. Finally one question - will there be delays in calling in indirect fire in CM:N? I gather there is no command delay for on map units?
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